Nauka

Contemporary world brings along a continuing interpenetration of cultures strengthened by the migration revolution. The social space created by multiplicity of ethnic groups is very often a result of migration processes which totally formed such states as Canada or Australia. The sources of the European multiculturalism were, on the one hand, the officially accepted workforce, on the other hand – immigration being the effect of the colonial past of such states as France, Great Britain or Germany

The article presents the author’s considerations relating to the current and common problem of multiculturalism. Nowadays “multiculturalism” can be defined as co-existence – in the determined physical, social and political sphere as well as in a concrete historical period of time – of many ethnic groups representing different axiological and normative systems. The social created by multiplicity of ethnic groups is very often a result of migration processes which totally formed such states as Canada or Australia. The sources of the European multiculturalism were, on the one hand, the officially accepted workforce as Federal Republic of Germany, on the other one – immigration being the effect of the colonial past of such states as France, Holland or Britain. All these countries took up more or less advanced actions towards being able to deal with the deepening ethnic diversification. There appeared political project – multiculturalism.

In the article, the author presents the basic relations between a nation state and a multicultural society. According to the author, the attitude of the nation state and the dominant nation in the state to the phenomenon of cultural diversity of society is a key phenomenon in the theory and practice of multiculturalism. Namely, the nation state is characterized by two strategies defining the attitude to the cultural diversity of society. It is a strategy of cultural homogenization and a pluralistic. The emergence of a pluralistic strategy begins with the occurrence and eventual growth of phenomena and processes referred to as multiculturalism and multicultural society.

In the last decades borderlands studies have been rapidly developing in various disciplines. Within the changing function of European borders (from separating line between two souvereign states to borderscapes of intercultural flows and fluid identity) the focus of border scholars moved towards social relations and bottom-up perspective. Thus, borderlands are perceived as laboratories of European integration and multicultural spaces. For the aim of this article, borderlands are defined as spaces located on the geographical border between different states, nations and cultures that are objects of European Union cohesion policy. By analysing the Eurobarometer survey on cross-border cooperation I try to demonstrate differences between border regions covered by the Interreg cross-border cooperation programmes in terms of cross-border practices, general trust in others and attitudes towards citizens of neighbouring countries.

The aim of the presented paper is to show the history of the development of research on social minorities in the environment of Bialystok sociologists. This research center, located on the north-eastern borderland of Poland, was one of the first in Poland to develop research in the field of borderland sociology. With time, the research subject has been expanded, from the analysis of the assimilation of the Belarusian minority to the contemporary face of the idea of a multicultural society, discussing not only nationality, religiosity, but also non-heteronormities.

The research task of the essay is to answer the question of what is the face of the nation in the ethnic enclaves situated at the peripheries of national states. The subject of the analyses is the local population of the village Jaworzynka. In 1922, the settlement Herczawa was founded as a local unit independent from Jaworzynka. Since then Herczawa began to belong to Czechoslovakia. The state-owned status of Jaworzynka, which started to be a part of the Republic of Poland, was recognized after the World War I. The author takes into account the longue durre of folk and national culture generated in the Silesian Beskidy in the second half of the 18th century. The national culture is the main term applied to the investigations of the borderland regions. According to the ethno-symbolic approaches (Anthony D. Smith) and culturalism methods in sociology (Antonina Kłoskowska), the author analyses in his research: 1) language, 2) religion, 3) folkways and mores 4) arts, 5) local knowledge and literature. These elements delineate the sphere of symbolic culture. Based on the common folk culture, two national cultures have been formed nowadays – the Polish and Czech ones. Both Polish and Czech Census Bureau data and objective elements of national culture discussed in the essay indicate the process of national revival. The local people of Jaworzynka identify themselves as Poles and the population of Herczawa define themselves as Czechs. The content and the form of the local culture are visible in Jaworzyna, but they seem to be latent or diminishing in Herczawa.

Some consider the multiculturality of Wrocław to be its obvious and socially legitimised “property”, whereas others view it as controversial and refutable construct. In the paper, we would like to investigate the multiculturality of the Lower Silesia’s capital taking into account its internal differentiation, which is mostly due to the adjudicating authorities – city authorities, its citizens and researchers — as well as observable dynamics. Hence, we propose to inspect the following: firstly, the real differentiation of the social structure of Wrocław’s inhabitants and its transformations related mostly to the influx of Ukrainians, who change the ethnic cityscape; secondly, the politics of municipal authorities regarding the promotion and strengthening of the city’s image as the multicultural, open and tolerant “meeting place”, as well as initiatives inscribed therein and other observable, contradictory events; thirdly, the evaluation of Wrocław’s multiculturality and its selected aspects performed by the city’s inhabitants and revealed in the research on this phenomenon in 2011 and in two editions of Social Diagnosis of Wrocław (2014 and 2017).

The main object of this article is to present the history of the establishing legal regulations in Poland concerning additional place names and other official signs in the languages of national minorities. This process has been always very difficult, because as it teaches the experience of many European countries, it affects issues related the national identity, the role of the national language in the state and the tradition of recognizing linguistic diversity in a given country. In the article, I will try to show that the introduction of such regulations in Poland has been with the one hand an important, perhaps even historical, change in the functioning of the Polish society and administration which consisted of official admission of other languages into the public sphere thus violating the dominant tradition of Polish language dominance in the country. From the other hand, the presence of a minority place-names indicates a change in the way in which minority groups publicly present their ethnic identities. It takes place not only through maintaining national cultures and learning the mother tongue but also through increased visual presence in the public sphere.

This article is in a sense a dialogue devoted to the presence of conspiracy theories on social media and mass culture. The authors present the current state of research on the development of digital culture and its social consequences. Next, a case study of the existence of the conspiracy theory of so-called Wielka Lechia is presented. In the analysis the authors combine theoretical and technical considerations of Web 2.0 with research inquiry, which is the analysis of the structure of the Great Lechia theory in social media. The problem of the popularity of the concept of Paweł Szydłowski's and Janusz Bieszk's has been referred to a wider context related to the modern functioning of historical knowledge on the Web. The factual orientation of historical education and the influence of social media on the functioning of the social dimension of history and historians have been indicated as the reason for the current state of the problem. Finally, the authors refer to the digital version of pseudoscience to its earlier analog counterparts and make a structural comparison of both. The effect of this confrontation is to point the phenomenon of remediation of conspiracy theories and the growing deprofessionalization of discourse, which ultimately leads to the end of the era of intellectual authorities.

Scientists around the world agree that nowadays, science is facing severe challenges like poor peer-review system, replicability crisis, or locked science behind paywalls. The National Science Center addresses at least some of them by introducing procedures that promote integrity, ethics, social responsibility, transparency, and openness in science.

The report encompasses the activity of the Committee on Ethics in Science in the year 2018.

Professor Jacek Fisiak’s outstanding achievements are well known in the scholarly community in Poland and abroad. He was an excellent and widely recognizable scholar, an exceptional teacher and talent-detector, an ingenious science manager, and he was so likeable and cordial! Professor Jacek Fisiak directed the Institute of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań for 40 years. Thanks to his management, English studies in Poznań obtained a leading position among such institutions in Poland and in the world. Professor Fisiak also cared about other English departments in Poland. On the one hand, he supervised 61 (!) PhD students who continued their academic careers throughout Poland, on the other, he supported English studies as well as the humanities and research in general as Minister of National Education and member of numerous influential bodies. I am grateful to Professor Fisiak for his guidance in my academic work, starting with my M.A., through the doctoral and post-doctoral degrees and the professorial title, my function as his deputy director for 3 terms, up to the ‘take-over of the command’ of the Institute and the creation of the Faculty of English. His opus survives and will last.